Naropa 1981 – Remembering Basil Bunting and Tom Pickard – 3 (Bunting)

Allen Ginsberg on Basil Bunting and Tom Pickard  continues from here

AG: (Jonathan) Williams went to see (Basil) Bunting, connected Bunting with  (Tom) Pickard, Pickard started that series (at the Morden Tower), two years later I arrived.
This is the whole point of what we’re getting to, or what I was getting to.  So because I had read Bunting, because I knew of his connection with Pound, I was real impressed, and so I wanted to display all of my work so I gave a four-hour reading or something.  I read all of “Howl,” all of “Kaddish“ entire, and everything up to what I’d been writing that year.  And Bunting was really patient and listened to it all, and when it was all over, I wondered what he thought, and he finally said, “Too many words.”  I read through “Howl” and “Sunflower Sutra“ and the entirety of “Kaddish” – my complete works from 1948 to ’63!   All he said was “Too many words.”  But he said it in a weird way. Not in a weird way. He said it in a way that I understood what he meant.  It was a very specific statement.  It was that, line-by-line if you checked out my lines, there were too many words in the line – that the ideas were right, the intention was right, the sketching was right, the imagination was right, but there were just unnecessarily a lot of adverbs, adjectives, sounds that didn’t contribute (at least from his point of view), that didn’t contribute to building anything interesting.  And, actually, that really affected me.  After I was mature and ripened somewhat, by 1965, I began to be a little more interested in checking out, line-by-line, if there was anything I could eliminate.

AG: Has Tom talked the general principles of condensation and elimination?
Student:  Yeah  Well, he uses …
AG:  How does he … what’s his angle?
Student:  … he uses the Ezra Pound example in the ABC of Reading  – “dictum = condensare.”
AG:  Yeah, but I mean …
Student:  Yeah.
AG:  … the actual practice, line-by-line.
Student:  Oh, yeah.
Student:  Yeah.
AG:  Get into the …
Student:  That’s what he’s been telling…
AG:  … nuts and bolts.
Student:  Yeah, that’s how he’s been applying …
AG:  Yeah.
Student:  … it to the poems.

AG:  Uh-huh.  Gregory (Corso) has a phrase for it.  He calls it “tailoring,” like snipping the cuffs and sewing up and taking in the coat so it actually fits.  He calls it tailoring, and that’s kind of an interesting image.  Blue-pencilling I guess is another word you could use.  It’s an interesting problem, because if you believe in spontaneous writing, which I do, or want to practice it, and at the same time you want that condensation, how do you … I mean, what do you do?  How do you reconcile those?   So I’m finding what I do is … Kerouac’s idea was speak now or ever hold your peace.  Just lay it on the page and if you burn your bridges behind you and know that you can never change it, never touch it again, that’ll force you to say whatever you have to say at the uttermost pitch of awareness.  Like a drowning man sees everything, you know, because you’re living in a desperate condition, artistically, in the sense that you can’t change it, so that you know every gesture then is going to go down in history as representing you, and you don’t want to look fat-assed or sloppy.  So Kerouac’s method is one way of forcing one’s self to be perfect on the first impression.      Yeah?

to be continued

Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately ten-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately fourteen-and-a-quarter minutes in